About Grades

Use the Grades tool to manage and share grades on assignments and tests with your students. Students can see your individual grades and comments, as well as class averages and feedback. They can also view their final grade and the grade formula used to evaluate you if your grades are released.

Course designers can set up grade books that reflect their approach to evaluation. You control the grading formula used to calculate grades; what projects, assignments, tests, etc. are graded; how grade items are associated with other tools; and when grades are released to users and what information they see.

Before you create a grade book, you should be familiar with the concepts the tool uses:

grade books

grade systems

grade schemes

grade calculations

Understanding the grade book

A grade book is a list of items on which you evaluate users’ performance. Grade items can include assignments, tests, discussion posts, participation, etc. Together, the items in a grade book represent all the work that you evaluate on in a course.

Before you can use the Grades tool you must set up a grade book.

Before you set up a grade book in BeachBoard you should know:

what grade items you plan to evaluate

how much each grade item should be worth

how you want grade items to be evaluated

how you want to calculate final grades

Although you can adjust your grade book later, making changes to how the grade book is structured or calculated after users’ grades have been entered can significantly change your data.